I picked up something interesting in another forum, one that’s unfortunately lightly trafficked, so I’d like to ask it again on the Dope.
For those of you well acquainted with Scottish English and its modern usage, especially in the Edinburgh area, is the past progressive less likely to be used than the past simple? For example, out of:
“I saw you. You were sitting in the corner, alone.”
and
“I saw you. You sat in the corner, alone.”
Does the second sound more authentic? Can you give me any more observations about selection between the two tenses? Thanks!
“You were sat”? In my dialect (pretty standard American, sometimes dipping into Appalachian) that would mean that someone else had put the person in a corner, as if they weren’t in control of their own limbs. How interesting.
A friend who is familiar with Scottish Gaelic suggested that speakers of that might use the Scots formation “You were to sitting”. But that wouldn’t occur to someone from the lowlands.
I’ve never heard anyone say “You were to sitting”. Granted, I’m from the Lowlands, but even so, I think I would notice someone using that formation as it would sound extremely incongruous.
There may be some Gaelic speakers in the Highlands who are not bilingual with English, but I doubt they could field a shinty team.
There was a recent thread on here where one of our resident linguists suggested that the only remaining monoglot Gaelic speakers are likely pre-school-age children. They would struggle with shinty I think
Irish here, not Scots, but our construction would translate literally as ‘You were at doing x’ rather than ‘to doing x’ (and it wouldn’t work with ‘sitting’, which takes a different construction). I’ve never heard anyone use it in English. In The Once and Future King, when T.H. White is writing conversations that are supposed to be in Scots Gaelic, he uses that structure sometimes.
Irish people don’t say ‘He was sat in the corner’, but I’ve heard Scottish and English people use it.
Just realised something: the ‘at’ construction doesn’t actually mean the same thing as the ‘sat’ one - we’re discussing two separate things. The Irish for ‘You were at sitting in the corner’ means ‘You were in the process of sitting down in the corner’. ‘You were seated in the corner’ is a whole different thing. In English, ‘sitting’ means both the action and the static condition of being seated, so it sounds like your friend blurred the two together.
I’ve been mulling it over since the first round of responses came in this morning, and specifically thinking about my grandmother’s old-timey Hoosier/Appalachian dialect, which derives in part from old-timey Scottish dialects. She’ll use “set” as an alternate pronunciation of “sit”. And if I heard her say
“You were set in the corner”
I wouldn’t blink an eye. It’s just a vowel shift away from the Scottish construction given in the first and second responses here. My brain has built a completely different linguistic story around the two, though. Ain’t linguistics grand?
(must be why I have a Ph.D. in it, my ignorance notwithstanding)
It would sound more natural to me to hear her say “you were set down in the corner.” Meaning, the person had in the past been seated in the corner. Which is odd because “sit down” and “sat down” are both about the act of sitting down, not the state of being seated…
Well, in Scotland I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone say “You were sat down in the corner.” I think most people wouldn’t, because the extra word would seem redundant, but it wouldn’t sound jarring or anything.
But my non-expert thought would be that you could be on to something in terms of your grandmother’s dialect and the way modern-day Scots speak.
I love the very little I’ve heard of Appalachian dialects. I bet they’re packed with Old Country holdovers that have long since died out in the old country.
These-a-days, the degree has boiled down to two useful points:
I learned to bloviate with the best of them, and
I occasionally enjoy telling people that I have it
I’ve been pondering the Scotland vs. Appalachia thing since starting this thread (while listening to Norman Blake’s album Whiskey Before Breakfast, which is conducive to pondering). There is just an awful lot about Scottish culture that is familiar and natural to Americans with roots in that region. It almost becomes the background against which everything else (cultural roots in Germany, central Europe, Africa, wherever) stands out. A quick read-through of some James Whitcomb Riley illustrates that well:
LITTLE Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns 'at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!
Phonetically, it reads not so differently from Robert Burns’ less-broad poetry, right?
And then there’s moonshine vs. illicit whiskey stills. And jigging vs. clogging and flatfooting.
And my grandmother’s, and even Aunt’s, abiding belief that Black Watch plaid is the most elegant thing ever… also that Scottie dogs are desirable jewelry motifs. Well, my great-grandmother was a Grant, so that excuses the Black Watch plaid at least.
And the list goes on. None of this is revelatory stuff, but it’s the headspace I’m in right now.
I like the rhyme. I don’t a lot about linguistics at all, but I love noticing little correspondences like that. Just for example, that ‘childern’ in the rhyme has echoes over here, too. In Ireland a lot of older people still say ‘childer’ as the plural of ‘child’.
Yes, I’m neglecting the Irish influence on all of it. Over here it’s thrown together and labelled “Scotch-Irish”. To which the proper response, I understand, is that scotch is something one drinks.
